Anya Pokazanyeva Foxen (Philosophy, Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo) May 24, 2017 / 3:00 PM 3041 HSSB In the United States in the 1920s there were two classes of people who could pull off a turban: “Oriental” men and fashionable white women. This fact points to...
Linda Hess (Religious Studies, Stanford University) Monday, April 24, 2017 /4:00 PM 6056 HSSB Kabir, the iconoclastic fifteenth-century poet-saint of North India, composed his poetry orally. His poems, transmitted through song, spread quickly and were soon preserved in manuscripts and other media. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and textual...
Prahlad Singh Tipanya and Ensemble Sunday, April 23, 2017 / 8:00 PM MultiCultural Center Theater The poetry of Kabir, the acclaimed fifteenth-century poet-saint of North India, has had a transformative influence on both Hindu bhakti traditions and the Sikh scriptural tradition enshrined in the Adi Granth....
Keith Cantú (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Madeline Cantú (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) March 3, 2017 / 3:00 PM Music Building, Room 1219 This lecture will center on the Bengali Bāul songs of Lālan Fakir, an acclaimed nineteenth-century Bāul fakir, and will be followed...
Bruce M. Sullivan (Asian Studies and Comparative Study of Religions, Northern Arizona University) May 22, 2016/2:30 PM Mary Craig Auditorium, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Hanumān is an extraordinary, even unique, figure in Hindu religious, literary, and artistic traditions. Famously, he has the appearance, and sometimes the character,...
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Monday, May 11, 2016 /4:00 PM 4041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis in South India, this lecture will center on a hereditary community of brahmin men from the village of Kuchipudi...
Adnan A. Naseemullah (South Asia and International Relations, King's College London) Friday, January 8, 2016 / 12:30 PM Lane Room, 3824 Ellison Hall This lecture will discuss contemporary industrial development in a new era of drastically constricted state capacity, from the point of view of the manufacturing...
Anrea Acri (Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore) Wednesday, November 18, 2015 / 5:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture will survey the Indic traditions of ṣaḍaṅga-yoga (“six-limbed yoga”) and aṣṭāṅga-yoga (“eight-limbed yoga”) in the Indonesian Archipelago, as illuminated...
Adam Krug (Religious Studies, UCSB) Friday, May 22 / 4:00 PM 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The Seven Texts on Siddhi (ca. ninth to tenth centuries) were influential in both the development of Vajrayāna Buddhism in India and the later emergence of the mahāmudrā meditation traditions of...
Najeeb Jan (Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder) Friday, May 8, 2015 / 12:00 PM 2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building On January 4, 2011, Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab, was executed by his own bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, for the crime of “Blasphemy against Islam.” This lecture...
Jeremy Hanes (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, March 11 / 4:00 PM* 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building *Please note the change in time. The North Indian goddess Śītalā was once associated with smallpox, a disease that is now only present in lab samples, yet she...
Aaron Ullrey (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, March 6 / 3:00 PM 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building During the medieval period Digambara Jains in Karnataka composed and circulated two magic Tantras containing aggressive magic that was in vogue at the time and that challenged...
Brenda Beck (Anthropology, University of Toronto) Wednesday, February 25 / 3:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Over the past decades Brenda Beck has brought a medieval Tamil folk epic, "the Story of Ponnivala", to life through film animation, producing a thirteen-hour series that has been...
Claire Robison (Religious Studies, UCSB) Wednesday, December 10, 2014 / 5:00 pm IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB The Indian International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) is assuming an increasingly central role in India’s Hindu public sphere, wielding vast economic assets, political influence, and, more recently, a posh...
Adam Krug (Religious Studies, UCSB) Wednesday, May 28 / 4:00 PM 3001E HSSB Adam Krug’s lecture will interrogate the category economy, broadly conceived, as a theoretical tool to interpret the abundant textual and archaeological data on the patronage and proliferation of Buddhist monastic institutions in India from the...
William S. Sax (Anthropology, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University) Wednesday, April 23, 2014 / 3:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB William S. ('Bo') Sax studied at Banaras Hindu University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Washington (Seattle), and the University of Chicago, where he...
Deborah Diamond (Curator, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution) Sunday, April 13 / 2:30 pm Mary Craig Auditorium, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State Street) Yoga is a global phenomenon practiced by millions of people seeking spiritual insight and better health. Debra...
Anya Pokazanyeva (Religious Studies, UCSB) Friday, February 21 / 4:00 PM 3041 HSSB It might seem logical to assume that a Yogi, by definition, is one who does yoga. However, as these terms first entered the American imagination they did not always do so in accordance...
Sudhir Mahadevan (Comparative Literature, University of Washington, Seattle) Friday, November 1 / 10:00 AM SSMS 2135 Popular histories of Indian cinema's past expose fundamental aspects of India’s cinematic imaginaries. This presentation surveys some of these histories, juxtaposing the official and corporate narratives with non-official ones. While...
Friday, June 7 / 4:00-6:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Jason Schwartz (Religious Studies) A Wizard in the Chronicles of Amber: Rethinking the Religious Culture of the Rājput Courts in Light of the Kachwaha's Śākta Preceptor This lecture will retrace the path traveled by the prolific Śākta...
Philip Deslippe (Religious Studies, UCSB) Wednesday, May 22 / 3:00 PM 3041 HSSB The recent outpouring of scholarly and popular writing on the history of American yoga has largely glossed over the seven decades between Swami Vivekananda in 1893 and the massive influx of swamis and gurus in...
Shalv Weil (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Wednesday, May 8 / 3:00 PM 3041 HSSB This talk discusses the Hindu temple genre of kirtan as it has been performed in different Jewish topographies by the largest of the three Indian Jewish communities, the Bene Israel of Maharashtra. Nineteenth-century Bene...
Kerry San Chirico (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Monday, June 4 / 7:30 pm 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In the Banaras region of Uttar Pradesh, so-called Hindu “Other Backward Classes” and “Scheduled Castes” can be found worshiping Yesu (Jesus) and venerating the...
Stuart Gray (Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, May 30 / 4:00 pm 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture outlined what Gray terms a historical-comparative approach to political philosophy and applied it to a study of ancient Greek and Indian conceptions of ruling. He...
Vasudha Narayanan (Religion, University of Florida) Monday, April 30 / 4:00 pm 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building What can we learn about Vaisnava theology when we study the largest "Hindu" temple ever built? Using inscriptions, art, and architecture as sources, this lecture focused on the...
John Stratton Hawley (Religion, Barnard College and Columbia University) Ninian Smart Memorial Lecture Thursday, April 26 / 5:00 pm 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In this lecture Hawley provided a critical assessment of the “bhakti movement” trope as a bifocal, multilayered notion that draws on...
Shalini Kakar (IHC Research Fellow) Wednesday, March 14 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture explored the devotional fandom centered around images of Bollywood film star Amitabh Bachchan in the Amitabh Bachchan Fan Association (ABFA) in Kolkata, India. Kakar investigated the ways...
Mark McLaughlin (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, January 18 / 4:00 pm 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture focused on the Hindu samadhi shrine, which marks the final resting-place of a realized saint’s body, as an expression of sacred space in South Asia....
John Stratton Hawley (Religion, Barnard College and Columbia University) Wednesday, November 16 / 3:30 pm 1910 Buchanan Hall It is no secret that religion is a very serious thing—de la vie sérieuse, Durkheim says somewhere. Yet in the lives of the bhakti saints, as told in...
Anne Blackburn (South Asian Studies and Buddhist Studies, Cornell University) Friday, October 14 / 5:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building As British and French colonial control deepened in Lanka and Southeast Asia during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Buddhist monks and devotees...
[vc_row css_animation="" row_type="row" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no" type="full_width" angled_section="no" text_align="left" background_image_as_pattern="without_pattern"][vc_column][vc_column_text]RESEARCH INTERESTS The IHC South Asian Religions and Cultures Research Focus Group is an interdisciplinary group of faculty and graduate students from twelve departments across campus whose research interests center on South Asia. The South Asian Religions and Cultures...
Van Maximillian Carlson (Director) Monday, May 23 / 7:00 PM Pollock Theater Bhopali (2011) documents the experience of second-generation children in Bhopal, India, who have been affected by the Union Carbide gas disaster of 1984, the worst industrial disaster in history, and subsequent contamination of groundwater by Union...
Shalini Kakar (IHC Research Fellow) Wednesday, May 11 / 12:00 pm McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Film stars are worshiped in India, and even temples are dedicated to them by their devotee-fans. The fan clubs of South Indian film star Rajinikanth publicly...
Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Thursday, April 21 / 4:00 pm 2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building This lecture focused on a certain trajectory in recent works by documentary filmmaker Madhusree Dutta: her preoccupation with the triad city-cinema-publics to...
Philip Goldberg (Author) Thursday, March 3 / 6:30 pm 4041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building For over two hundred years India’s philosophies and practices have been transforming the ways in which Americans understand and engage in religious and spiritual practices. This multimedia presentation illuminated this remarkable history and...
Saturday, January 15 / 9:00 am–6:00 pm Loma Pelona Conference Center This day-long workshop brought together scholars from the United States and Asia with leaders of various international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to examine the role of religion in global civil society, with a particular focus on...
Mark Dyczkowski (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Delhi) Wednesday, May 19 / 5:00 pm 2001 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building One of the most notable features of the development of tantric scriptural traditions, especially in the early period of their formation, is the...
Rowena Robinson (Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) J. E. and Lillian Byrne Tipton Distinguished Visiting Professor in Catholic Studies Tuesday, May 18 / 4:00 pm Alumni Hall, Mosher Alumni House The lecture briefly traced the past of Indian Catholics in order to enable us to...
Saloni Mathur (Art History, University of California, Los Angeles) Wednesday, February 17 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Professor Mathur’s lecture revisited the legacy of Amrita Sher-Gil, the part-Indian/part-Hungarian painter who stands at the cosmopolitan helm of modern Indian art, by focusing on...
Bishnupriya Ghosh (English, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, February 3 / 4:00 PM 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Icons have a glittering life in South Asia, both as enduring images and as fleeting ephemera. We have lengthy and erudite studies of liturgical icons as well as...
David White (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, January 27 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building David White discussed his 2009 book Sinister Yogis, a historical reconstruction of the history of yoga through the lens of its agents, the yogis of...
Mary Hancock (Anthropology and History, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, November 18 / 4:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This presentation focused on the history of visual anthropology and its current theoretical and methodological agendas. Particular attention was paid to visual anthropology in/of...
Rohit Singh (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, May 22 / 4:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Drawing on historical and popular sources, the lecture examined representations of Buddhist and Islamic traditions in Ladakh. Most sources depict the region as a Buddhist...
Mark McLaughlin (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, May 15 / 4:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In Hindu liturgical texts and architectural treatises a temple space is understood as the embodied presence of the deity who is housed within, and the deity is...
Luis Oscar Gómez (Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico) Michaelsen Endowed Visiting Scholar Wednesday, May 6 / 4:00 pm 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Silence and abstinence appear in the ideals and practices of a wide variety of religious traditions. Following...
Shalini Kakar (History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, February 27 / 4:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture investigated the phenomenon of “devotional fandom” in the Rajinikanth Fan Club (RFC), exploring the ways in which the over 60,000 fan club...
Suman Mukhopadhyay (Director) Friday, December 5 / 7:00 pm 1701 Theater Dance Chaturanga, based on the novel by Rabindranath Tagore, is Suman Mukhopadhyay's second feature film. It is being screened at this year’s Montreal World Film Festival and Sao Paolo International Film Festival. Suman Mukhopadhyay has worked...
Pankaj Rishi Kumar (Director) Monday, November 3 / 7:00 pm 1004 Girvetz Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s film is a journey into the sweet science of boxing as practiced by two Indian women. The film unfolds as they wrestle with their day-to-day existence as boxers and the conflicts...
Michael Radich (Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) Monday, June 9 / 4:00 pm 2252 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture presented a significant revisioning of the history of Buddhist notions of the Buddha’s bodies. Through an examination of evidence from three disparate sources that...
Olle Qvarnström (History of Religions, Lund University, Sweden) Friday, May 23 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture examined constructions of embodiment in Jain traditions. Particular attention was given to the dietary regimens, sexual practices, purity regulations, and psychophysical disciplines through which...
Steven P. Hopkins (Religion, Swarthmore College) Friday, May 2 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture focused on the charged emotional landscapes of divine, human, and animal bodies in Hamsasandesa (“The Goose Messenger”), a fourteenth-century Sanskrit messenger poem (sandesa-kavya) by Vedantadesika (ca. 1268-1369...
Knut A. Jacobsen (History of Religions, University of Bergen, Norway) Wednesday, April 16 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture explored the public display of religious bodies in various types of processions in the contemporary South Asian diaspora, with a particular focus...
June McDaniel (Religious Studies, College of Charleston) Friday, March 7 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture explored important issues concerning ethnographic fieldwork methods in the study of South Asian religions. Drawing on her fieldwork in West Bengal, McDaniel discussed a range...
Kendall Busse (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, February 20 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture examined the nature of divine embodiment in the Mahabharata through an analysis of the terminology used to portray divine bodies and a comparison...
Amandeep Sandhu (Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, January 30 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Amandeep Sandhu’s lecture presented his research findings on cultural changes among Indian call center workers performing global service work in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley. His lecture...
Rajkamal Kahlon (IHC Visiting Artist) Wednesday, May 16 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Rajkamal Kahlon is a New York-based artist whose work interrogates forms of colonial and racial authority in her dialectical engagement with historical texts. Kahlon’s lecture focused on her current...
Tracy Pintchman (Religious Studies, Loyola University Chicago) Wednesday, May 9 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In recent decades a great deal of attention has been devoted to critiquing nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Indological scholarship and its Orientalist and colonialist discourses...
Suman Mukhopadhyay (Director) Tuesday, April 24 / 6:00 pm 1701 Theater Dance Suman Mukhopadhyay’s debut feature film Herbert is based on Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novel of the same name, which won the highest literary prize in India. The film has received numerous awards, including the Dhaka International...
Judith M. Brown (History, Balliol College, Oxford University) Erasmus Society Lecture Series, Westmont College Thursday, April 12 / 7:00 pm Founders Room, Westmont College, 955 La Paz Road, Santa Barbara The lecture explored the impact of South Asian immigrants, including Muslims, Sikhs, and Muslims, in transforming...
Scott Marcus (Music, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, March 9 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Biraha is a folk music genre of the Bhojpuri region of North India situated across eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar. The genre, created in the early...
Inderjit N. Kaur (Sikh Music Heritage Institute, Santa Cruz) Monday, March 5 / 12:30 pm 1414 Bren Hall The lecture addressed two questions: what is Sikh sacred music, and what is Sikh about this music? The answer to both questions derives from the special nature of...
Juan Campo (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, February 21 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture focused on Muslim and Hindu interactions in pilgrimages in the South Indian region of Malabar (present-day Kerala) and their connections with the Hajj...
Farina Mir (History, University of Michigan) Wednesday, February 14 / 3:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture explored two themes: the relationship between literature and history, and the nature of gender relations in late colonial India. The lecture examined whether our understanding of...
Will Glover (Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan) Wednesday, February 14 / 12:30 pm 1414 Bren Hall The lecture sought to illumine the distinctive nature of Sikh architecture. After surveying the repertoire of forms, colors, and bulding elements that are shared by Sikh buildings, Hindu...
Isabelle Clark-Decès (Anthropology, Princeton University) Friday, May 19 / 3:00 pm 2252 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In this lecture Isabelle Clark-Decès explored new paradigms for the study of South Asian rituals, drawing on her field research on a Tamil ritual that is performed in times...
Moinak Biswas (Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta) Friday, April 28 / 1:00 pm 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture explored how the rise to stardom of Uttam Kumar (1926-1980)—who is considered the most successful actor in Bengali cinema—coincided with the fashioning of a new...
Linda Hess (Religious Studies, Stanford University) Friday, March 3 / 2:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building After a brief reflection on the bias towards text-based methods in Religious Studies, the lecture addressed the all-pervasive importance of oral transmission, music, and other performance forms in...
Olle Qvarnström (History of Religions, Lund University, Sweden) Tuesday, February 28 / 6:00 pm 2252 Humanities and Social Science Building The lecture examined contending constructions of omniscience in Jain and Purva-Mimamsa philosophical traditions. Olle Qvarnström is Professor of the History of Religions at Lund University, Sweden. One...
Friday, January 27 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Following our successful inaugural conference on South Asian Studies in the United States in the fall, we invited all interested faculty and graduate students to join us for a planning meeting of the South...
Friday, December 2 / 9:00 am to 6:00 pm Multicultural Center Theater This conference served to inaugurate our newly established IHC Research Focus Group in South Asian Religions and Cultures. The conference featured nine eminent scholars from around the country reflecting on significant developments in South...